Pope Francis puts flowers on the altar inside St. Mary Major Basilica, 03/14/13. (photo: L'Osservatore Romano/AP)
Pope Francis and His Charisma of Low Expectations
09 February 14
hen the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child called on the Vatican to boot out all child abusing priests, report them to the law, and open church archives to make officials who concealed their crimes accountable, the Church replied in the worst possible way.
Specifically charged with refusing to acknowledge the extent of the abuse, failing to address individual cases, and adopting policies that encourage more abuse and more impunity for the priestly perpetrators and their ecclesiastical protectors, the Vatican tried to turn the tables and present itself as the victim. According to Archbishop Sylvano Tomasi, the Holy See's permanent observer at the U.N. in Geneva, the 18-member committee had given in to pro-gay ideologues and was attempting “to interfere with Catholic Church teaching on the dignity of [the] human person and in the exercise of religious freedom."
The committee appeared more interested in enforcing the “ideological line” of liberal groups in favor of gay marriage and sexual education in the schools, said the archbishop. Among the beliefs it said must be rethought for the sake of children is the church's stand that gay sex is a sin, abortion is the taking of a life, and contraception is a wrongful interference with God's plan for married couples.
“These are the values that in the tradition of the Catholic Church sustain the common good of society and therefore cannot be renounced," said the tough-talking Tomasi.
Hearing Tomasi and other Church spokesmen, I had to wonder, whatever happened to the lovely Pope Francis? With his humble touch, he remains – as columnist Gail Collins called him – “perhaps the only person in the world almost everybody likes.” Many progressives especially liked his famous riposte when asked what he thought about homosexuals. “Who am I to judge?” he said. We liked even better his call for the Church to move beyond its obsession with abortion and contraception to work for social justice. Yet the church Francis leads continues to judge homosexuals harshly, ducking its many failures on child abuse by attacking some supposed pro-gay, pro-abortion agenda. All that, and Pope Francis walks away relatively unscathed. Well, he’s trying, isn’t he?
Why does the media, even on the Left, give the former Argentine archbishop Jorge Bergoglio a pass? Why does he remain the Teflon pope? Is it because so few of us expect such an apparently nice guy to turn around such a large institution with such a long history of haughty pride and wholesale prejudice?
Next month, Francis will celebrate his first year as head of the Holy See, a year in which his charisma of low expectations has protected him far beyond issues of child abuse and doctrinal homophobia.
When I first wrote about him last March, I was primarily interested in his role in Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s. Most of the testimony I used came from sources within a deeply divided Church, whose claims Vatican spokesmen promptly dismissed as old smears from the anti-clerical left. Forgive me if I see a pattern here in how the Church tries to deflect criticism.
Was Bergoglio complicit with the military, especially in its joint efforts with the Church to root out priestly adherents of liberation theology who worked with slum dwellers and the rural poor? Or did he try to mitigate suffering, as he and his supporters insist? I know that Argentina’s most famous human rights campaigner and winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace stood up for Bergoglio. “Perhaps he didn’t have the courage of other priests,” said Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. “but he never collaborated.” Others think he did and offer evidence to prove it, while he himself has been what I called “a reluctant, vague, and often evasive witness” about his role – and that of his fellow priests – in the dirty war. Yet I came away with “a surprising sympathy” for the new pope, whom I saw still suffering the scars of what he did – and did not do – during that terrible time.
As the widely-respected theologian Harvey Cox noted last month in The Nation, the new pope in one of his first official acts invited to Rome Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian priest who helped create liberation theology, with its much celebrated “preferential option for the poor.” Cox, with whom I once had the rare joy of swapping ideas on the so-called “Death of God,” now sounds much more upbeat. He sees the pope’s outreach to Gutiérrez as an important symbol, as was the pontiff’s decision to restart the beatification process for one of liberation theology’s great heroes, Archbishop Oscar Romero, whom an El Salvadorian death squad assassinated in 1980. Cox makes the case that Pope Francis is becoming the new champion of liberation theology, especially with his doubts about the free market and denunciations of “the structural causes of inequality.” Cox’s argument is a must read. Sadly, I do not share his wishful thinking.
Like Cox, most progressives welcome the pontiff’s defense of the poor, his criticism of capitalism as we know it, and the stinging rebuke when he asks why “it is not news when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points.” But what truly defines liberation theology and sets it apart is the willingness to work with the poor to liberate themselves, and to do it without worrying how much of the idea comes from Jesus Christ and how much from Karl Marx. John-Paul II, soon to be sainted, and then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger worried about just that, as did their partners in crime in the Argentine Church and military, and in the U.S. government.
How worried is Francis or those around him? Would he risk his popularity and his charisma of low expectations to openly give his support to those in his church and beyond organizing left-wing revolutions? It does not seem likely, since at least so far the pope has said little that goes beyond Peronist critiques of capitalism from his youth, the social ideas of the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, and a call to love the poor, an idea that had 2000 years to show it is not nearly enough to solve their earthly plight.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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